Art at the Information Influx Conference

QR-cities
Technology influences how we live, work, learn and communicate. Boundless streams of information flood our daily lives; shorten our attention spans, interrupt our thoughts and conversations, destroy our peace and quiet. Erik Timmermans’ series of paintings, QR-cities, confronts us with a multitude of questions about the information society. The QR-code is a map of dystopia: a cold metropolis where people neither see nor speak to each other, and only interact online. It is a place where friendships are virtual; a society that has got wired of being wired. The QR-code is a symbol of the insatiability and ubiquity of the information world. Could it also become a symbol of a new vision of information law?

Erik Timmermans completed his studies at IViR in 1995 before taking up a position as a lawyer at the Dutch Publishers Association. In 2010, he decided to steer a different professional course, opting for sustainability and art. Recurrent themes in his work as a visual artist include: (societal) decline, war, architecture and memories. He set up the online art gallery 10x10artist.com and is joint-owner of Atelier Open.

with: Séverine Dussollier (IP professor), Wilco Kalff (teacher), Sanne Rovers (documenatry film maker), Margot Van de Linde (improvisation actress) and Arnisa Zeqo (art historian).

The modern concept of intellectual property relies fundamentally upon the assumption of a division between the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. However, for many practices such a split is difficult to make.  

For Assembly (Information Influx), Agency calls forth a 'thing' from its 'list of things' speculating on the question: "How can commons become included within artistic practices?" In order to qualify for copyright protection, an art work must be "original". During Assembly (Information Influx) Agency invokes Thing 002094 (Être et avoir) in order to bear witness.

Thing 002094 (Être et avoir) concerns a controversy between Georges Lopez, a teacher in the village of Saint-Etienne-sur-Usson in a one-room school high in the Auvergne mountains, and Nicolas Philibert, a documentary film maker, about Lopez classes which feature in Philibert's film entitled Être et avoir. Lopez claimed that his classes were oral works, dramaturgy interventions and also an interpretation of a performance reproduced in the film. During the court case "Lopez v. Philibert" the judges at Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, the Cour d'Appel de Paris and Cour de Cassation had to decide if the teaching classes by Lopez could receive the status of a work or performance protected by copyright.

Bio
Agency is a Brussels-based initiative that was founded in 1992 which constitutes a growing 'list of things' that resist the split between the classifications of nature and culture. These 'things' are mainly derived from controversies around intellectual property. Agency calls things forth from its list via varying 'assemblies'. Every 'assembly' explores in a topological way the operative consequences of the value system of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of art practices and pays attention to different agencies.